Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Is a Baffling Failure

By Garrett Martin | July 30, 2024 | 10:26am

Video Games Reviews nintendo

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition Is a Baffling Failure

I figured I’d be the perfect guy for Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. A new twist on some of the most important games of my childhood, named after an event I actually went to when it hit Atlanta in 1990? A kind of sideways sequel to the cool NES Remix series, which combined warp-speed fragments of many of the same games, but combined with fun, weird updates that added unique new spins on these classics? More leaderboards to scale for a dude who loves pinball, shmups, and games like Pac-Man Championship Edition DX? Sign me up, right?

And yet. I’ve been playing it for the last couple of weeks and it largely feels like a chore. It’s light on content, missing some features that are absolutely necessary for a game like this, and runs out of fuel in record time. I’ve been using it as a palate cleanser between other games, something to hop into for five minutes between Shadow of the Erdtree and Kunitsu-Gami, or a way to kill time when I have a free 10 minutes before doing something more important. It ultimately just feels unnecessary in a way the NES Remix games didn’t—a low-effort way to get some more money out of these games that came out 30 to 40 years ago.

Here’s what’s on tap. Nintendo World Championships gathers together excerpts from 13 NES and Famicom games that were originally released between 1983 and 1993, from the home port of Donkey Kong to Kirby’s Adventure. The main Speedrun Mode features several challenges for each game, from entry-level “Normal” tasks that can take as little as two seconds, to “Master” and “Legend” challenges that might ask you to complete an entire level of a game. The goal is to beat all these challenges as quickly as possible; the better your time, the more coins you get, which can be used to unlock new challenges.

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For an example of what these challenges can be like, the first one on the list is from Super Mario Bros. It’s called “Mushzoom” (every challenge has a punny or goofy name) and it tasks you with getting the very first super mushroom from World 1-1. In other words, it’s over about as soon as it begins, lasting just a few seconds. Other challenges will see you trying to beat Kid Icarus and Legend of Zelda bosses, finishing Excitebike laps, and popping a specific number of balloons in Balloon Fight. With each challenge the goal is to complete it as fast as you possibly can.

That focus on speedrunning will often change how you view some of these games—again, games that some of us have known well for 40 years. It’s exceedingly hard to make Super Mario Bros. or Metroid feel fresh in 2024. The rapid-fire repetition of trying to shave milliseconds off my fastest time for getting the morph ball or making it to the first warp zone has made me really consider every motion, though, breaking these games down at a granular level that I’ve never approached them with before. There’s something to be said for that.

Nintendo World Championships

The problem is that I don’t think I’ve gained anything from that microscopic focus. Completing basic tasks in Ice Climber or Zelda II over and over, while trying to economize my actions, doesn’t make me appreciate these games any more than I already did—and it makes me enjoy them less. I mean, Ice Climber is challenging enough without adding a series of stopwatches for every little thing you do in it. One reason I usually hop out of Nintendo World Championships within 10 minutes or so is that redoing the same things again and again with no fulfilling purpose quickly feels like a big waste of time.

It’s also surprising that there are only 13 games included. Sure, the actual Nintendo World Championships in 1990 featured excerpts from only three games (two of which, Tetris and Rad Racer, are not a part of this new game), but that was a legitimate competition, and not a commercial product being sold for $30. All of these games are available at no extra charge for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers, and you can actually play them there, from start to finish, and not just blast through a simple task 30 times in a row in hopes of cutting .02 seconds off your record. Given the large library of first-party games for the NES and Famicom, 13 games feels paltry—and that’s without noting that some of them only have a half-dozen challenges to complete. There’s just not enough to do here.

Nintendo World Championships tries to make up for that lack of variety by including a couple of online modes. World Championships is a weekly playlist of five challenges of different difficulty levels that players around the world can compete in. After a week it ranks your best times against every other player, as well as other players born in the same year as you (yeah, this game wants to know your age). Meanwhile Survival Mode simulates head-to-head play by having you square off against ghost data from seven other players. The bottom half gets eliminated after each round before the last two face off in the finals. Both of these modes recycle the exact same challenges from the Speedrun Mode, and neither are real, live competitions, so playing them doesn’t feel any different from each other. They’re the same exact challenges in a slightly different context, and that’s it.

World Championships and Survival Mode at least try to compensate for Nintendo World Championships’ biggest and most inexplicable failings: there are no actual leaderboards or online play here. You can’t compare your best times with your online friends, and you can’t even directly compete against them. If you want to challenge your online friends the best you can do is play the World Championship mode alone, on your own Switches, and then share your ranking with each other after the results are released at the end of the week. Yeah, you can’t even see how your friends did in the World Championships each week—or even see the name of the winner. What’s the point of a “World Championship” when nobody even knows who “wins” it?

If there were actual leaderboards here, or any way to play online against friends, there’d be a lot more life to the game. It would actually have a reason to exist at that point. Instead it’s a competitive game where you’re solely competing against yourself and nameless, faceless online strangers. You might as well be playing against the computer the whole time—it wouldn’t feel any different.

The one exception to all of this is Party Mode, which lets up to eight people play against each other in the same room. Nintendo’s commitment to couch co-op and communal play is commendable. It’s also not a serious alternative to real online play if you don’t have people living with you who are interested in blasting through fragments of 40-year-old videogames, or aren’t in a situation where friends can come over to challenge you.

If you’re somebody who was never able to attend any of the in-person tournaments Nintendo has held over the decades, you might’ve been excited for this home version. Sadly it just doesn’t add up, due to the same reluctance over online play that Nintendo has shown for three console generations now. The lack of leaderboards and a true online system makes Nintendo World Championships a uniquely pointless game, and something that can’t keep my interest past the length of a pop song. If Nintendo ever gets serious about what they’re seemingly trying to do here, perhaps there can be a future for Nintendo World Championships, whether it’s an update of NES Edition or one based on another of Nintendo’s classic consoles. Until then, it’s one of the most misguided games I’ve ever played.

Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition was developed and published by Nintendo. It’s available for the Switch.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.